Video camcorders have been around for many years and provide non-professional users an easy and an inexpensive mechanism for capturing life moments. Conventional video footage recorded by non-professional users suffer from three major problems that have no practical solutions. The longevity of a conventional video tape is approximately 10 years, after which the tapes degrade rather quickly. Homeowners and renters alike typically store video tapes in non-secure storage means that are susceptible to theft and damage (e.g., fire, flood and other natural disasters). Finally, most video tape recorded by conventional non-professional users includes a more junk than real footage. That is, non-professional users of camcorders tend to not set up their shots and as such over record, creating undesirable junk footage. Conventional editing tools where available are difficult to use and very time consuming. As such, most non-professional users keep all of the raw footage on tape without editing out the junk.
Conventional solutions to these problems are either inadequate or too expensive. Tape-to-tape duplication services are available, but costs are not trivial and the duplicate tapes suffer from the same limitations discussed above. Professional encoding of video tapes to optical disks is very expensive typically on the order of magnitude of $60/min. Home equipment for digital encoding and editing where available is expensive and time consuming to operate.